interlocking pores,
while that hush of beating slows,
held, with many oars,
heart over heart, leg over leg,
trading still breath, until,
heart over heart, and seed into egg,
night holds two bodies still.
FINAL AUTUMN
Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard.
Light drives lower and one bluejay crams
our cold memories out past the sun,
each time your traces come past the shadows
and visit under my looking-glass fingers
that lift and block out the sun.
Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn,
and you can trace your last homecoming
into the snow or the sun.
ELEGY FOR MY FATHER
HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.
—Hart Crane, “Voyages”
If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly
past the long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves haven’t opened,
where night is reflected through decades of glass.
There is the nursery, there is the nanny,
there are my father’s unreachable eyes
turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy?
His is the death that is circling the stars.
In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly
and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies,
three of us are watching, one of us is staring
with the wide gaze of a wild, wave-fed seal.
Incense and sage speak in smoke loud as waves,
and crickets sing sand towards the edge of the hourglass.
